Animation fans I know that i've already talked about this show (at least I have depending on where your seeing this review) but it was after watching it and writing the review of it that something hit me I came to the realisation that I could should I choose review any episode of the show. So that's what i've done well at least for the first episode I don't know if this will be a weekly thing or not but it gives me a chance to talk about Love, Death & Robots some more so here is my review of episode one Sonnie's Edge.
The plot of this short is a girl and her beast enter this contest where the aim is to stay alive but what happens when the contests owner offers the girl alot of money to loose. I'll admit that plot wise it's not that good since all you get is the basic set up but for something that's only seventeen minuets long that's kind of what you'd expect but given how rich the world building is here I would have loved the story to have been a bit stronger.
Now when I wrote my review of the whole series there was no cast list to be found however that has since changed so starring in this episode is Helen Sadler as Sonnie , Hayley McLaughlin , Jennifer , Time Winters as Dicko , Omid Abtahi as Wes and Christine Adams as Ivrina. Before I talk about what I thought about the acting i'm going to tell you know that just because IMDB has finally added the cast doesn't mean i'm going to re-write my review of the series it just means that whenever I review an episode i'll list the cast.
As for what I thought about the acting given that the actors don't really have that much dialog in the whole short it's honestly pretty good. I say pretty good because I did my research and alot of the actors in this short really haven't been in anything noteworthy outside of a few random TV episodes and some short films so this short in my opinion was there chance to fully show of what they can do and I hope that it leads to them getting more work down the line.
This is one of four shorts that was animated by Blur Studio with the others being episode 2 "Three Robots" episode 4 "suits" and episode 10 "Shape-Shifters". Since the show uses different styles of animation for each episode I have to say that this episodes uses CGI and it looks freaking fantastic like I saw this show on Saturday and I was blown away by how good the CGI looked and even now when I went to load the episode up I was still blown away.
Given that this is the same studio that did the fantastic opening for the 2011 remake of my favourite film The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo it really doesn't surprise me that the CGI was good. It surprises me tho in the way that they pulled it off on basically a web series budget and that's now got me hopeful that they'll one day work on an animated feature film since if this the kind of animation they can do with a small budget then picture what they could do with a few hundred million dollars.
If I ever do more reviews on this series this is something that you'll hear me say alot but I really hope that they give this short it's own series. I say that because the world building was good in this episode that it made me want to find out more not only about the world and it's rules but the characters that live within it. I know that the chances of this short getting it's own series is most likely not that good since it would cost a lot just to do the animation but we can dream.
It was also while watching this short that I came to the realisation that Sonnie is this show's version of Lisbeth Salander from The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo there both bada*s strong women who have been both physically and mentally tortured by men and our now doing something about it. I hope that i'm not the only one who's made those connections but at the same time I could just be looking way deep into something that isn't there.
Now i've thrown up the old warning sign because there's alot of nudity and alot of gore in this episode and there was no way I could do a review on it and not feature images of it mostly because there the only images Google has of the episode. Yeah this episode is gory as hell and when I say gory I really mean it like you see people's heads getting stomped on and monsters getting their arms ripped of it's awesome.
I will admit that both the nudity and the gore is just there for the sake of it like you could remove both of those aspects from the short and you'd loose nothing plot wise or character wise. One of the things that really interested me and I think many others judging from the comments i've seen of this episode online was just how good the twist ending is i'm not going to give it away but I will say that it's something you don't see coming and that's what I good twist should be.
This short has a monster fight and that means we have to talk about the fight itself and for me personally the fight in this short is freaking insane. Heck i'd have been happy if the whole episode was just this fight but at the same time im glad it's not because I honestly love sonnie but tho what I think makes this fight standout from other monster fight scenes is that it appears that this one is advancing the story being told and with that twist helps with the great world building and that's something that i've not seen before now.
Overall this isn't my favourite short of the series if you want to know what this you'll either have to wait or read my review of the show but let's just say it's not one your expecting. This short tho is a great start to the series and so it gets an 8.5 out of 10 from me.